Letters 4 Life: Freeping V.M312

I can hardly stand another Motion 312 post, and you probably feel the same way. But 17 days away from the final vote and certain demise of the motion, and the subsequent MASS persecutiongasm, there will be more to say on this sordid subject, so bear with me.

One of the antichoice initiatives launched in support of Motion 312 is something called “Letters 4 Life”, which for the last few months has been gamely trying to get 100,000 letters sent to Parliament by the day of the vote. 100,000 is a nice round number, and presumably L4L means to give the impression that 100,000 Canadians are so strongly opposed to abortion rights that they’ve been driven to penning shrieking spittle-flecked screeds to Harper et al. A few days ago they had 65,000 letters sent – not too bad, assuming they were from 65,000 individuals. But some people just can’t resist snarking off:

That was obviously the incentive they needed because a couple of days later the number of letters went PARABOLIC:

But why not? Anything’s possible, with the Power of Prayer.

No, I wasn’t buying that either, so I decided to find out if there might be something other than Prayer Power behind the MASSIVE spike in letter-writing.

My first stop was the L4L site’s “letter tracker”. This is where letter-writing fetus fetishists record how many letters they sent, and apparently they’re being encouraged to send hundreds…

…and proving themselves more than up to the task. To wit, on L4L’s Facebook page there’s a post from someone who thinks 30 letters from one individual isn’t very many:

…so she grabs the crack pipe and suddenly she’s banging them out at top speed:

Yay Nancy, Freeper Extraordinaire! I wonder how many others are cranking out letters at this rate? I had been under the impression that “100,000” meant 100,000 individuals sending one(1) letter, but it could just as easily be 200 wired-up Nancies, each churning out a frenzied 5 or 600 letters.

The letter tracker’s question “Do you live in Canada” was also intriguing and more than a little sinister. I fired up the Googles for some investigative blogging and instantly hit paydirt in the form of an obscure little American website, the Teenage Life Club, flogging their own ‘Stand for Life’ antichoice campaign that advises sending messages to the White House… and Congress… and… the Canadian Government??:

Really, eh? If some little high school club is doing this, presumably they’re not the only ones: they had to get the idea from somewhere. I checked in on Nurse Stanek’s Sweet & Sour Fetus Cafe & Quik-Lube, and sure enough she has an article about the “Stand Up For Life” campaign, with a link to the site. “Letters 4 Life” is mentioned at Stanek’s without a direct link, but at least some of her substantial and furiously zealous traffic would find its way there from the Teenage Life Club’s site. I wonder how many other US sites are telling their readers to write letters to the Canadian government?

I sincerely doubt that a small number of people — some of whom aren’t even eligible to vote here — obsessively sending thousands of form letters to Parliament will tell our elected officials anything other than who CSIS should be keeping an eye on.

One thing about this confuses me. How can one person send 600 copies to MPs?

That must mean they’re sending multiple copies of the letter, signed by themselves, to the same MP.

If this really is the M.O., surely it would be a trivial matter to write an automatic email script that cranks out thousands of letters an hour. If they had a little more imagination (and even less respect for the law, obviously), maybe they’d crash Parliament Hill’s email server by deluging it with abortion spam.